Longtime CDT columnist leaves lasting impact on students, farmers, community members
Compost. Vegetable gardens. High tunnels. Victory gardens. Irrigation. Blue potato chips. This is just a small sample of the hundreds of topics writer Bill Lamont taught us about through the years in his twice-monthly column in the Centre Daily Times.
Bill, a Penn State professor emeritus in the department of plant science, died on Nov. 5. He was 78 and had fought a yearslong battle with heart disease. I only learned that by reading his obituary. While we exchanged dozens of emails in the near-decade that I edited his column, I don’t remember a single complaint, unless it was about lack of rain.
He was always positive and kind, usually signing his emails, “Your friend, Bill.”
To test the extent of his positivity, I went back in my email to March 18, 2020 — the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when it was all so uncertain and frightening. His column was attached to an email that still makes me smile.
“Wow — what a time we live in!! I suspect you are practicing social distancing and working from home,” he wrote. “I am fine as the trees have tested negative for the virus but have other problems over the years. All this will pass and we will come out hopefully stronger and smarter.”
Next year would have been the 20th anniversary of Bill’s “Over the Garden Fence” column in the CDT. He submitted it dutifully and never seemed to run out of ideas.
As readers of the column know, his many friends helped him with that.
In June, he wrote about Asian jumping worms after Bethany Spicher Schonberg, who runs Plowshare Produce in McAlevys Fort with her husband Micah, sought his advice.
Spicher Schonberg said that Bill would frequently show up at the farm, whether it was to share a helpful article, volunteer for weeding and harvest projects or to drop off his blue and white Tailgater Tater chips for their kids. (Potatoes for the chips were grown on the farm).
“When Asian jumping worms showed up in my flower garden, he was the first person I called, because I knew he’d drop everything to figure it out,” Spicher Schonberg wrote in an email. “Even in his retirement, Bill was a tireless educator and advocate for small-scale farmers. We’ll miss Bill’s spontaneous visits, his hearty laughter and his generous spirit.”
Of course, we didn’t learn just about plants and gardens through “Over the Garden Fence.” Bill sprinkled in stories about growing up in Huntingdon Valley, his military service and his beloved family — his wife Phyllis and their two sons and grandchildren.
Friends at the North Atherton Street Waffle Shop and Rinaldo’s Barber Shop in downtown State College were frequent sources of inspiration for his column. He wrote a number of times about ideas gleaned from conversations with “my favorite barber, Becky” at Rinaldo’s.
Becky Durst, who talked and laughed with Bill for years when he sat in her barbershop chair, said sometimes he’d ask her for column ideas or sometimes they’d come naturally through their conversations.
“There was a lot of laughing in the chair and a lot of learning,” she said. “I learned a lot from him.”
If he didn’t immediately know the answer to a question, he relied on his vast network of gardening experts. Teaching — and learning — were passions, having taught at Kansas State University and North Carolina State University before arriving at Penn State more than 20 years ago.
Elsa Sanchez, professor of Horticultural Systems Management, met Bill when she started working at Penn State in 2002 and they worked together until he retired in 2017. As a teacher, he was charismatic and inventive, she said.
“Bill was so good at coming up with these ideas,” Sanchez said. “One of his ideas was to develop a class for undergrads who weren’t in ag so they could have a taste of ag and maybe fall in love with it like we did.”
That class — “Gardening for Fun and Profit” — did exactly what Bill thought it would, Sanchez said. They taught it together for years, capping it at 25 students and always seeing high demand, all through word of mouth.
After Bill retired, he kept in touch with Sanchez and others in the department of plant science, with many of them serving as sources of information for “Over the Garden Fence.”
“He was very good at what he did academically, but the way he built relationships, the way he connected with people and how kind he was — that might even be a bigger legacy of Bill’s,” Sanchez said.
And while gardening was perhaps his best-known interest, his wife Phyllis said he also loved singing, reading about history, and most of all, being around people.
“When Bill would walk in a room, Bill would brighten up the room,” Phyllis said. “He had a big smile and he made people happy — and I think that was reflected in ‘Over the Garden Fence.’”
I’m grateful to have known my friend Bill and to have helped deliver his column to CDT readers for so many years. After looking back at his March 2020 email and reflecting on the reassurance he brought, I reread his column from that same time. He encouraged us to look to our gardens as “a solace and a source of stability in today’s chaotic world,” advice I plan to take into the future.
“As you can see the natural rhythm of the world of nature and gardening will continue regardless of the upheavals that swirl around us,” he wrote. “It will give us a sense of grounding that can be comforting in a world of ups and downs. If we take time to appreciate the positive energy that comes from the soil and feel it under our feet and in our gardening activities we will make it through the ups and downs of our daily lives.”
This story was originally published November 14, 2024 at 8:30 AM.
